Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Bill Davidsen
2005-12-06T14:59:05Z

Greg KH wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 04:46:31AM +0000, Luke-Jr wrote:
>
>>Well, devfs does have some abilities udev doesn't: hotplug/udev
>>doesn't detect everything, and can result in rarer or non-PnP devices
>>not being automatically available;
>
>
> Are you sure about that today? And udev wasn't created to do everything
> that devfs does. And devfs can't do everything that udev can (by
> far...)
>
>
>>devfs has the effect of trying to load a module when a program looks
>>for the devices it provides-- while it can cause problems, it does
>>have a possibility to work better.
>
>
> Sorry, but that model of loading modules is very broken and it is good
> that we don't do that anymore (as you allude to.)
>
>
>>Interesting effects of switching my desktop from devfs to udev:
>>1. my DVD burners are left uninitialized until I manually modprobe ide-cd or
>>(more recently) ide-scsi
>
>
> Sounds like a broken distro configuration :)
>
>
>>2. my sound card is autodetected and the drivers loaded, but the OSS emulation
>>modules are omitted; with devfs, they would be autoloaded when an app tried
>>to use OSS
>
>
> Again, broken distro configuration :)

If a new udev config is needed with every new kernel, why isn't it in
the kernel tarball? Is that what you mean by "broken distro
configuration?" The info should be in /proc or /sys and not in an
external config file, particularly if a different versions per-kernel is
needed and people are trying new kernels and perhaps falling back to the
old.

Have "make install" drop the udev config in /boot like the initrd file.
The the boot could create an slink to "/boot/$(uname -r)-udev" or some such.

--
-bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
last possible moment - but no longer" -me